Uzbekistan

Linguistic Background

Uzbek is a Turkic language of the Qarluq family, closely related to
Uyghur and Kazak. Although numerous local dialects and variations of the
language are in use, the Tashkent dialect is the basis of the official
written language. The dialects spoken in the northern and western parts of
Uzbekistan have strong Turkmen elements because historically many Turkmen
lived in close proximity to the Uzbeks in those regions. The dialects in
the Fergana Valley near Kyrgyzstan show some Kyrgyz influence. Especially
in the written dialect, Uzbek also has a strong Persian vocabulary element
that stems from the historical influence of Iranian culture throughout the
region (see Early History, this ch.).

Uzbek has a relatively short history as a language distinct from other
Turkic dialects. Until the establishment of the Soviet republic's
boundaries in the 1920s, Uzbek was not considered a language belonging to
a distinct nationality. It was simply a Turkic dialect spoken by a certain
segment of the Turkic population of Central Asia, a segment that also
included the ruling tribal dynasties of the various states. The regional
dialects spoken in Uzbekistan today reflect the fact that the Turkic
population of Southern Central Asia has always been a mixture of various
Turkic tribal groups (see Ethnic Groups, ch. 1; Social Structure, ch. 2;
Population, ch. 5). When the present-day borders among the republics were
established in 1929, all native peoples living in Uzbekistan (including
Tajiks) were registered as Uzbeks regardless of their previous ethnic
identity.

Until 1924 the written Turkic language of the region had been Chaghatai,
a language that had a long and brilliant history as a vehicle of
literature and culture after its development in the Timurid state of Herat
in the late fifteenth century. Chaghatai also was the common written
language of the entire region of Central Asia from the Persian border to
Eastern Turkestan, which was located in today's China. The language was
written in the Arabic script and had strong Persian elements in its
grammar and vocabulary. Experts identify the Herat writer Ali Shir Nava'i
as having played the foremost role in making Chaghatai a dominant literary
language.

In modern Uzbekistan, Chaghatai is called Old Uzbek; its origin in
Herat, which was an enemy state of the Uzbeks, is ignored or unknown. Use
of the language was continued by the Uzbek khanates that conquered the
Timurid states. Some early Uzbek rulers, such as Mukhammad Shaybani Khan,
used Chaghatai to produce excellent poetry and prose. The
seventeenth-century Khivan ruler Abulgazi Bahadur Khan wrote important
historical works in Chaghatai. However, all of those writers also produced
considerable literature in Persian. Chaghatai continued in use well into
the twentieth century as the literary language of Central Asia. Early
twentieth-century writers such as Fitrat wrote in Chaghatai.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Chaghatai
was influenced by the efforts of reformers of the Jadidist movement, who
wanted to Turkify and unite all of the written languages used in the
Turkic world into one written language (see The Russian Conquest, this
ch.). These efforts were begun by the Crimean Tatar Ismail Gaspirali
(Gasprinskiy in Russian), who advocated this cause in his newspaper Terjuman
(Translator). Gaspirali called on all the Turkic peoples (including the
Ottoman Turks, the Crimean and Kazan Tatars, and the Central Asians) to
rid their languages of Arabic, Persian, and other foreign elements and to
standardize their orthography and lexicon. Because of this effort, by the
early 1920s the Turkic languages of Central Asia had lost some of the
Persian influence.